*** Update: interesting look at one of the NSC sources in the WaPo article and his ties to the leftward fringes ***

Looks like Mary McCarthy and the rogue CIA agents, along with the news media (and an out of control prosecutor?) have decided the time is right to admit she was just trying to be a hero. The Washington Post is getting more leaks about McCarthy from her ‘friends’ (Rand Beers, Sandy Berger, Richard Clarke):

McCarthy became convinced that “CIA people had lied” in that briefing, as one of her friends said later, not only because the agency had conducted abusive interrogations but also because its policies authorized treatment that she considered cruel, inhumane or degrading.

I do not recall McCarthy also being judge and jury and electorate? We have a conflict of opinion about how to treat terrorist who have sworn to die killing as many of us as possible. When did this become sufficient conditions to break the law?

Whether McCarthy’s conviction that the CIA was hiding unpleasant truths provoked her to leak sensitive information is known only to her and the journalists she is alleged to have spoken with last year. But the picture of her that emerges from interviews with more than a dozen former colleagues is of an independent-minded analyst who became convinced that on multiple occasions the agency had not given accurate or complete information to its congressional overseers.

What is fascinating about this is McCarthy, as deputy Inspector General for the CIA, knew what the process was to go to Congress as a whistleblower and call these people on their lies. In fact, if she had the goods on someone at the CIA lying to Congress she would have been the darling of Reps and Dems – especially those like John McCain. Congress gets very angry if they feel they have beenb lied to under oath. She had the clout as Deputy IG to be taken seriously.

But we know from Democrat and Republican staffers McCarthy never once availed herself of the whistleblower status. There is no record of her once challenging the reports to Congress. She had all the opportunity, but she went to Dana Priest? If she was such a maverick, independent thinker, why not turn these people into Congress? She was retiring! There could be no retribution aimed at her for disclosing lies!

You know what – this sounds like a truly pathetic attempt to cover up her illegal acts. She is claiming she knew of lies to Congress, and not once told the one institution that would be angered by her news, be on her side, and protect her name. Want to know what this was about?

McCarthy was not an ideologue, her friends say, but at some point fell into a camp of CIA officers who felt that the Bush administration’s venture into Iraq had dangerously diverted U.S. counterterrorism policy.

She is admitting she fell in with the rogues who felt they needed to toss out the Constitution and take the country into their own hands. As Margaret Carlson said, the CIA wanted a new President and decided to take act. It is said Nixon used his power to distort the powers of government to his political benefit. The partisan liberals in key government positions have done the same thing – abused their positions and used our government for their personal desires.

Stunningly McCarthy is still leaking, through her friends, classified details. And all these details dovetail nicely with Dana Priest’s stories. So McCarthy was so upset at the lies being told Congress she did not use the avenue open to her to take these charges to Congress (who cannot stand being lied to), but took it to the Washington Post. Yeah, right.

One thing that escapes all these people is the CIA employees take an oath to protect the constitution and follow the orders of the President. So when you see these kinds of comments it is clear they have thrown those oaths out the window:

They allege that her firing was another chapter in a long-standing feud between the CIA and the Bush White House, stoked by friction over the merits of the war in Iraq, over whether links existed between Saddam Hussein’s government and al-Qaeda, and over the CIA-instigated criminal inquiry of White House officials suspected of leaking the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame.

Folks, it is illegal for the CIA to fued with the President. It is illegal for the CIA to leak information to the media to influence elections. The CIA spokeswoman soft pedals this a bit in my opinion

She said it was provoked solely by the officer’s admission to CIA investigators to having provided classified information to the media. “You can’t ignore an officer ignoring their secrecy agreement,” Dyck said.

You can’t have them ignore their oaths to uphold the constitution either. And Clintonesque denials are not going to help much longer to help the media keep access to their sources:

But McCarthy, in e-mails to friends, has denied leaking anything classified. She has not denied speaking to Priest but has said she was unaware that the CIA had secret prisons in Eastern Europe, the most attention-getting detail in Priest’s articles last year.

McCarthy has been trying to spin ‘confirming leaks’ as not the same as ‘leaking’ since it is not the initial exposure of the information. Controlliing classified information doesn’t work that way. You cannot expose it, nor confirm or deny details. But now we know she did talk to Priest. And my suspicion is she tipped off investigators to the true ‘leakers’ to get out of trouble:

Reporters at The Washington Post and other publications do not discuss sources for articles beyond what is published. Priest’s disclosures about the secret prisons were attributed to multiple current and former intelligence officials on three continents.

If I were these sources I would be worried right now. If they are being recalled to America, I would be really, really worried. In fact those in the know with McCarthy are few and should be shaking in their boots right now:

Little else is known publicly. The CIA inspector general’s reports have narrow circulation. When IG inquiries involve covert actions such as foreign interrogations, for example, the agency briefs only the chairmen and ranking members of the House and Senate intelligence committees, instead of the full panels. So only a handful of people in Washington knew what McCarthy knew.

Rockefeller must be sweating bullets right now. McCarthy clearly had access to the top congressional leaders on intelligence matters, yet when she saw what she considered lying to Congress, after staring down all sorts of power players in the CIA and the NSC, she decided to go to the media instead of Congress? What a nice, naive, liberal fantasy the WaPo has provided us.

Update: Rick Moran sees the same hypocrisy between McCarthy the maverick and McCarthy the partisan snitch.

7 Responses to “Mary McCarthy Admits Her Maverick Ways”

“CIA officials have said that McCarthy nonetheless will receive her pension.”

It does cause me to wonder: does Alrich Ames receive whatever part (# of years served) of his government pension package which was applicable at the time of his, err, termination? Heck, does he get social security benefits?

AJ I have noticed that the left leaning blogs are all up in a twitter that Fritz is by their estimation about to come out with charges on Rove. Now stepping back from this a bit, as you have well pointed out in your commentary the weakness of his position as to the Libby case, one could wonder what he would have to present in a case against Carl? The man is not wining major points with the judge so far..Fritz seems to be floundering and thrashing around..to bring another charge considering the weakness of his present case, would make one wonder if this Judge will look with a jaundiced eye on such happenings.

This leakage for political purposes needs to stop. Someone needs to expose this for the Watergate sized scandal that it is because if not, it will render CIA useless (which might be the objective of some of the people involved anyway). What reason do we now have to believe that if a Democrat is elected President, some Republican partisans won’t start leaking in order to damage that administration? Are we setting ourselves up for a series of tit-for-tat leaks to damage one side or the other? Is the CIA then reduced to nothing more than a domestic political dirty tricks squad?

It is clear at this point that there are people employed by the CIA that can not be trusted with classified information. There are apparently people without enough emotional fortitude to go through proper channels and live with the fact that their point of view isn’t accepted. It is also clear that we have journalists who would damage our country to further their world vision.

Why Dana Priest still has a job at the Washington Post given her obvious conflicts of interest if honest reporting is beyond me. At this point I have to assume that the Washington Post itself is rotten and can not be relied upon as a valid source of honest reporting.

“Nixon used his power to distort the powers of government to his own political benefit…”

Not exactly. When a Nixon-era Mary McCarthy, Daniel Ellsberg, pilfered and provided the “Pentagon Papers” to an earlier Risen or Priest, the Nixon Administration exhausted legal means to stop the publication. The Court ruled against the Administration because such “prior restraint” would amount to an abridgement of the First Amendment.

Then Nixon called in J. Edgar Hoover, and requested that Hoover and the FBI undertake a somewhat questionable investigative course. Hoover’s response was, “Of course, Mr. President, as soon as you give me the signed order.” The request was withdrawn.

Enter “the pumbers,” a small group (G. Gordon Liddy, et. al.) gathered by (reportedly) John Mitchell, Nixon’s Attorney General, to ‘find and plug the leaks.’

Then, as now, we were at war. American servicemen were fighting and dying in Vietnam, and the enemy within were aiding the foreign enemy by trying to undermine and discredit our Commander in Chief, his Administration, and our national security.

Who among us, having witnessed the current ongoing ‘attempted coup of a thousand cuts’ against this President cannot muster, not necessarily approval, but at least a small bit of sympathy and understanding for Mitchell’s perceived need for this covert assistance?

The plumbers made some apparent foolish blunders, most notably in being connected to a couple of rather dubious operations: An ostensible “burglary” of a psychiatrist’s office, where only a patient file on Daniel Ellsberg was missing, for example.

Then, the big one, Watergate. But that wasn’t a “botched burglary,” and it wasn’t even an unsuccessful intrusion. The plumbers had already been inside the DNC offices there, they had planted the bug with which they expected to identify an insider feeding information to the DNC leadership, and they had left with no apparent signs of their having been there.

But, they were then sent back in by WH Counsel John Dean, to retrieve or remove papers that had nothing to do with the White House or Nixon or the Administration, but were of personal interest only to Dean, regarding his wife.

The second entry was careless and sloppy. Tape covering the lockout on an exit door was not removed when they gained entrance, and a security guard discovered the jerry-rigged access point during regular rounds, while the plumbers were still inside. Police were called and the plumbers taken in on burglary charges.

It was only after the first news stories hit that Nixon learned any specifics, and he asked Mitchell if the alleged burglars “are ours?” Told that “Yes, they are,” Nixon refused to throw them under a bus and simply stonewalled.

So, yes, Nixon participated in a cover-up, and it led to his downfall. But it wasn’t a cover-up of his own transgressions. And, lest we forget who the finger-pointer-in-chief was during the subsequent hearings and bally-hooing … it was John Dean.

My brother in law has worked for the Justice Dept for over thirty years. In all that time he has never allowed his personal politics to get in the way of his job. He would consider that unprofessional. What exactly is the profession of some like Mary?

I would like to beg forgiveness from those of you who I’ve playfully referred to as “slimeball” or “marmoset brain” or even “liberal pus bucket” over this whole Mary McCarthy imbroglio. In my towering ignoranc…

Although Mary McCarthy has not come out of hiding, she has still been a busy.
Mary McCarthy Admits Her Maverick Ways
Looks like Mary McCarthy and the rogue CIA agents, along with the news media (and an out of control prosecutor?) have decided the t…..